Politics|Disputed North Carolina Race May Hinge on a Shadowy Operative

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Disputed North Carolina Race May Hinge on a Shadowy Operative

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State regulators in North Carolina have refused to certify the preliminary results of a House race that showed the Republican nominee, Mark Harris, right, with a 905-vote edge over Dan McCready, left, his Democratic opponent.CreditCreditJeff Siner/The Charlotte Observer, via Associated Press; Chuck Burton/Associated Press

ELIZABETHTOWN, N.C. — L. McCrae Dowless Jr. should have been celebrating. It was 2016, and he had just been elected as a soil and water conservation district supervisor in rural Bladen County, N.C. But he instead came before the State Board of Elections to fan fears of fraud and to air a protest about a race in which he had been victorious.

“I’m not saying there’s any wrongdoing here,” Mr. Dowless told the Raleigh-based board. “I just want it investigated because it was a high volume of write-ins.”

Only two years later, Mr. Dowless has gone from a Republican gadfly in North Carolina’s incessant battles over voting rules and alleged fraud to being at the center of an escalating battle over disputed ballots that could overturn the House election in the Ninth Congressional District.

Mr. Dowless, witnesses and party officials said, helped to oversee a voter turnout operation on behalf of the Republican candidate, Mark Harris, in which canvassers collected absentee ballots directly from residents — a violation of North Carolina law. Sworn statements from voters and unusual absentee voting statistics have stoked suspicions over whether ballots were fraudulently filled out for Mr. Harris or discarded if they were for his Democratic rival, Dan McCready.

State regulators have refused to certify the preliminary results, which showed Mr. Harris with a 905-vote edge. If state officials find that the balloting was tainted enough to “cast doubt” on the results, they would have the power to order a new election.

The dispute — and the identity of the Ninth District’s next congressman — may not be settled for weeks. On Tuesday, Representative Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat who is the incoming House majority leader, suggested that Democrats might refuse to seat Mr. Harris if concerns about the election remain.

“If there is what appears to be a very substantial question on the integrity of the election, we would oppose Mr. Harris being seated until that is resolved,” said Mr. Hoyer, whose chamber has the constitutional authority to be “the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members.”

The House will likely take some of its cues from the findings of the sprawling inquiry that has begun in North Carolina, where elections regulators are poised to hold an evidentiary hearing this month.

Investigators have prepared a batch of subpoenas, including one that they sought to serve Tuesday on the Charlotte-area consulting group that contracted with Mr. Dowless. They have questioned people about what Joshua Malcolm, who was named this week as the election board’s chairman, described last week as “claims of numerous irregularities and concerted fraudulent activities.”

The known claims are concentrated in Bladen County, which has about 33,000 residents, and neighboring, far larger Robeson County. Bladen County, where elections officials work in a simple brick-and-glass building on South Cypress Street, just behind a shopping center with a Dollar General and a furniture store, recorded the state’s highest rate of absentee ballot requests: 7.5 percent of registered voters, compared with less than 3 percent in most of the other 99 counties.

A strikingly large number of those ballots, 40 percent, were never returned. In Robeson County, 62 percent were not returned. No other county had a rate higher than 27 percent. Mr. Harris won 61 percent of submitted absentee ballots in Bladen County, even though registered Republicans accounted for only 19 percent of the ballots submitted.

Those statistics, coupled with the alleged and acknowledged machinations of Mr. Dowless, who has a felony record and a history of financial fraud, and his workers sparked what slowly swelled into another bitter electoral impasse in a state that seems perpetually engulfed by them.

On Tuesday, the district attorney for the area, Jon David, said law enforcement officials were investigating allegations related to the 2016 elections and were in contact with each other “to coordinate our efforts should a prosecution be warranted” in the wake of this year’s suspicions.

Almost all the worries, for now, involve absentee ballots. In an affidavit, a Bladen County resident, Emma Shipman, wrote that she had recently handed over her ballot to a woman who told her that she was assigned to collect ballots in the district. Another voter wrote that she gave her incomplete ballot to a woman who promised she would finish it.

State officials are also reviewing other claims. Mr. Malcolm, the elections board chairman, said Tuesday that the authorities would release documents on “a rolling basis in a manner reasonably calculated to serve the public interest without compromising the investigation.”

Perhaps no figure is more central to that inquiry — or the subject of more rumors and speculation — than Mr. Dowless, who was assigned to get-out-the-vote efforts in the eastern part of the Ninth District, which runs from Charlotte to east of Fayetteville.

Mr. Dowless, 62, could not be reached for comment, and Red Dome Group, which hired him for Mr. Harris’s campaign, did not respond to messages. Mr. Harris has said he will “support any efforts to investigate allegations of irregularities and/or voter fraud, as long as it is fair and focuses on all political parties.” And although Republicans have threatened litigation to try to compel the state to certify the election results immediately, they have yet to bring a lawsuit.

In enlisting Mr. Dowless, the Harris campaign’s consultants signed on a man with some political knowledge but a blemished personal history.

He was deeply familiar with the get-out-the-vote efforts on which candidates at all levels rely: State records show that beginning in 2009, at least seven Democratic and Republican candidates paid him for work in local and state races, including campaigns for the Legislature, district attorney and county sheriff. Separately, campaign finance records in Mecklenburg County showed that Mr. Dowless worked for a City Council candidate in Charlotte, the state’s largest city.

“He was just a known figure,” said former State Representative Ken Waddell, a Democrat who hired Mr. Dowless after receiving a recommendation. “To me, it appeared like he just liked politics.”

Mr. Waddell had no complaints about Mr. Dowless’s integrity during the campaign, but recalled disagreements about where to place signs in the district. Years earlier, though, Mr. Dowless’s character had come into question after one of his employees died in an automobile accident.

The Fayetteville Observer reported in 1991 that Mr. Dowless and the woman he eventually married had, after the employee’s death, taken out a six-figure life insurance policy in the man’s name by forging a signature and backdating a document. Mr. Dowless listed himself as the primary beneficiary and collected benefits.

Mr. Dowless was eventually sentenced to a short prison term, and state records show convictions for, among other offenses, perjury and fraud.

But after prison, Mr. Dowless pursued, at least in part, a life in politics. As a Democrat, he sought a seat on the local school board in 2014 and was defeated in a primary. He was unaffiliated when he ran for the soil and water conservation district board in 2016 and switched his party registration to Republican after the election.

The election results, though, had raised concerns in and around Bladen County. Although Mr. Dowless was running unopposed, about a third of the vote went to write-in candidates. Encouraged and aided by the chairman of the county Republican Party at the time, he submitted a protest to the state and argued that there was “a pattern of fraudulent ballots.”

But Mr. Dowless did not appear to know all that much about it when the state elections board convened a hearing.

Asked for the name of the lawyer who helped him to prepare his protest, Mr. Dowless recalled him only as “Steve.” (The lawyer also represented Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican whose bid for re-election would soon end in a narrow defeat.)

Asked whether he knew how to obtain the financial disclosure reports of the political action committee that he, in his protest, had suggested was behind “a massive scheme to run an absentee ballot mill,” Mr. Dowless said he did not.

At one point, a member of the board pointedly asked, “Are you familiar with your protest?” Mr. Dowless, who invoked the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination when he chose not to answer a question, said that he was.

The board’s questioning eventually raised concerns about Mr. Dowless’s own efforts to pursue absentee ballots in 2016 and prompted the attention of law enforcement officials. The board dismissed the protest because of “a lack of substantial evidence of a violation of election law or other irregularity or misconduct sufficient to cast doubt on the results of the election.”

The same standard will apply now, as the state board, itself jolted and upended by political turbulence in recent years, decides how to referee North Carolina’s latest electoral storm.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Hazy Operative Becomes the Focus in a Bitter House Race in North Carolina. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe